Showing posts with label birthday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birthday. Show all posts

12.07.2013

on the eve of my twenty-ninth birthday

"That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it."

and this:
“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”


both, Joan Didon

12.08.2011

lying up

The other day, as a joke, I told my students I was turning 40 today.

(The little smart things that they are came back immediately with, "Really? We thought you were older." Zing.)

But it got me thinking . . . the stereotype is to lie and say you're much younger than you are, which has always seemed perfectly silly to me, especially once I realized that if people believe you, they're very likely going to think you look a little haggard for your age.

How much more intelligent to lie up instead of down? Then people think you look fantastic, and endow you with assumed wisdom and experience to boot.

I think I'm going to be turning 40 for at least the next five years.